Bond With Death by Bill Crider

about the fact that she’d already eaten two Hershey bars in one day. She was going to balloon up another dress size if she didn’t watch out, and it would all be Jennifer Jackson’s fault.
    Yet another thing that steamed Sally, and a more serious one, was the way the Jacksons and even Fieldstone were condemning witches in general and Sarah Good in particular, as if the foolishness of 1692 hadn’t been exposed again and again in the more than three hundred years since the witchcraft trials.
    Sally was saved from her own blood pressure when someone knocked on the door. She couldn’t continue brooding in a locked office, as everyone knew she rarely closed the door. Sooner or later she was going to have to come out.
    She popped the last bite of candy into her mouth, wadded up the candy bar wrapper, and threw it in the trash can. She wiped her fingers on a tissue that she pulled from the box she kept on her desk for the convenience of students who started crying while explaining their troubles to her. The troubles usually came down to the fact that
the students’ instructors hated them with the result that they were making Cs instead of As. Or possibly some cruelly unjust instructor wouldn’t allow makeup work to some poor student who had missed two weeks of class to go on family vacation that couldn’t be taken any time except in the middle of the college semester.
    Sally checked her fingers to be sure there were no telltale chocolate stains remaining. There weren’t, so the tissue followed the candy wrapper, and Sally got up to open the door.
    Standing there waiting for her was Samuel Winston. He looked at her with the big round eyes that had caused his students to nickname him “the Owl.” Sally had the impression that he thought teaching in a community college was beneath a man of his powerful intellect, and sometimes his students got the same idea.
    â€œYes, Samuel?” Sally said. He was the kind of person who insisted on being called by his full name. No shortening to Sam was allowed.
    Winston blinked twice. Then he said, “Someone stole my stapler. I left it in the copy room for a few minutes, and when I came back it was gone.”
    Ah, Sally thought. Things are getting back to normal.
    Â 
    Finding the stapler didn’t require the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes. The copier room was located right down the hall from Sally’s office, and Wynona Reed could see the entrance from her desk. Hardly a person who entered the copy room escaped her constant vigilance.
    Sally told Winston to follow her, and they went over to Wynona’s desk.
    â€œTell her,” Sally said.
    Winston blinked.
    â€œIt was Baldree,” Wynona said before Samuel could get a word out. “Big black stapler, right? I saw her leave the copy room with it. She wasn’t carrying it when she went in there.”
    Sally thanked her and told Samuel to come along. He trotted along behind her as she led him to Ellen Baldree’s office. Ellen, who thought she should have been named department chair when Sally
was hired, had never liked Sally, but she hadn’t been openly defiant. She had adopted the “I can last longer than you” attitude and settled in to wait for Sally’s firing. As it hadn’t happened yet, Ellen had become increasingly sullen around Sally, sometimes even openly resentful, but she was still a professional in the classroom. She had even volunteered to take some computer classes so she could teach the department’s WebCT classes, and she had developed into quite a computer whiz.
    The door to Ellen’s office was open. The office was so small that Ellen’s desk and bookshelves barely left room for her office chair. Sally and Winston had to stand outside the door to talk to her.
    â€œI think you took Samuel’s stapler from the copy room by mistake.”
    Ellen shook her head, and Sally noticed, not for the first time, how very black